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From the government shutdown to Kanye West and Jimmy Kimmel's showdown, the Barbershop guys weigh in on the week's hot topics.

Washington could be headed for another government shutdown. Guest host Celeste Headlee asks NPR's senior political editor Ron Elving whether there are any lessons to be learned from previous shutdowns.

Also Friday, there's word from the Kenyan Red Cross that 59 people remain missing. Terrorists killed at least 61 civilians and 6 security officers during the attack on a mall in Nairobi and a four-day siege that followed.

Can online comments be redeemed? That conversation, plus highlights from our tech coverage on-air and online, are in our latest week in review.

Federal Reserve chairmen used to be named without much fanfare. Not this time. A very public competition between former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and the current vice chairman of the Fed Janet Yellen has made headlines and pitted the White House against liberal Democrats in Congress. It raises the question of whether the Fed succession has become too politicized — and whether it could ultimately hurt the economy.

If the government shuts down next week, hundreds of thousands of federal employees could be temporarily forced out of their jobs. In 1996, President Clinton sought to highlight the impact of such a shutdown by telling the story of one heroic federal worker.

In Blowback, Plame channels her expertise in nuclear counterproliferation into a "realistic portrait" of a female covert agent. Plame confesses that there's a lot of downtime in the life of a spy, but still, the CIA is "the world's biggest dating agency."

This year marks the 125th birthday of Nobel Prize-winning poet T.S. Eliot. To celebrate, a re-issue of the first edition of his seminal poem has just been published, with an introduction by New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon. NPR's Scott Simon speaks with Muldoon about the poem's lasting influence.

The months-long federal trial is examining how much fault should be placed on BP and its contractors for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion. The accident killed 11 rig workers and released almost 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Host Scott Simon speaks with NPR's Debbie Elliott to preview the civil trial.

Britain's Brian Cookson says he will focus on helping cycling recover from years of doping scandals. "I felt I owed it to the cycling world to put an end to the misery that we were all going through," he says.